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March 2008

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Excerpt: "Names on a Map," by Benjamin Alire Sáenz:

1:51 AM Sat, Mar 01, 2008 | Permalink
Michael Merschel

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Here's an excerpt (posted a bit early, just in case that software update goes crazy on us) from "Names on a Map," by Benjamin Alire Sáenz , which will be reviewed Sunday in GuideLive.

I came to consciousness listening to my brother's heartbeat. We shared a womb, a mother we very nearly worshipped, a father we came close to hating, a younger brother we adored. For the first eighteen years of our lives, Gustavo and I listened to my father and my mother, observed the nuances of their difficult and beautiful love, told each other secrets, argued about the books we read, listened to the cadences and rhythms of our words and silences.

And yet it was all those silences that had the last word. Gustavo and I--twins--genetically and emotionally tied to each other. A knot we carried around inside us that shifted from our minds to our stomachs to our hearts. Sometimes we even forgot the knot was there.
My father never referred to the day we were born, but he liked to tell people that his son and daughter were born in the middle of the American century. He used to tell us that we were destined to live through the same history, his history. Gustavo looked right at him and said, "I want to make history, not live through it."
"Only great men do that," my father said.
Gustavo ignored the insult. "So maybe I'll be great."
"Not with your grades," my father said.
They used words like bullets. Such wasted ammunition. It made me angry, the way they treated each other. My father was wrong. Gustavo and I did not live through the same history. No one lives through the same history. Not even a set of twins.
He was born a man.
I was born a woman.
The world asked him to a fight a war he did not want to fight.
The world asked me to fight a different kind of war.

(Excerpt provided courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.)

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Excerpt: "Names on a Map," by Benjamin Alire Sáenz:

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